Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

She shook her head. “Sorry, honey. This bird’s dying. A nice thing you did keeping it from drowning and all, but we’re going to have to euthanize it.”

“You’re not even going to try to save him?”

“He’s beyond saving. Look at him. He’s suffering.”

“Suffering means you’re still living,” I told her, but I knew the bird’s destiny had been decided.

She picked him up with one hand, crushing his wings together, and left me with the empty box.

I tell the whole story to my brother during Sunday visiting hours at the prison. Everything except the flesh scene between Joe and me on the sofa. Carlito really doesn’t need to hear that. He has women writing letters to him, but he’s not allowed to meet any of them like some of the other inmates with normal privileges.

When he was still in county jail, I started sending my brother books because, believe it or not, Carlito was the biggest reader you ever met, even during the years he was doing crappy in school, before he went to a real college. My brother was the smartest guy I knew — could talk to you about ancient wars, religions, all sorts of stuff that you’d wonder what a guy like him had any business knowing. But my brother said knowing about the world was important. He said by reading you develop ideas of your own and ideas are what keep a brother alive.

I’d pack boxes full of books about whatever I could find to send him. When this old guy on the corner died, his widow said I could have all his books, which she left in boxes out on the curb, so I sent those too. Biographies, historical shit. Everything. And within those packages I’d sometimes sneak in a batch of porno magazines even though they’d likely get confiscated — I thought it was worth the effort — because I understood that a guy in jail might have urges of the kind my mother often described, and nobody to take care of them.

One day Carlito said, “No more books. No more magazines. Nothing.”

When I asked him why, he repeated what he’d said years earlier, that books give a man ideas, they make him want to live. But ever since the judge put Carlito’s last minutes on the clock, having ideas and hope were making it even harder and more painful to be alive.

My brother kisses my hand and rests his cheek on the back of my palm the way he always does.

He tells me he loves me and I say, “I love you too, hermano.”

“You know what tomorrow is,” Carlito says, and I nod, surprised that he’s still keeping a calendar.

September 8. The anniversary of the day our father threw him off the bridge.

What kind of a man can do that to a child , is what we used to say until Carlito did the same thing.

Five days later, I’m on the same journey, edging down the turnpike with the scrim of sunset lowering in the west, passing through Florida City, strip malls and car dealerships melting into swampland and fishing tackle shops, past Manatee Bay onto the Overseas Highway. It’s drifter territory, where people go to forget and to be forgotten. I’ve come to think of this land as a second home. The prison motel; familiar faces though few of us have exchanged names. Each of us serving our sentence, waiting, waiting, because prison has made us more patient than we ever knew we could be, until we get the call that it’s time; the end of the sentence, or just the end.

About a year ago, I saw Isabela at a wake for Miguel, one of Carlito’s old friends, a guy she eventually married. I waited until midnight thinking the mourner crowd would dissolve, then go to someone’s house for a meal or a drink, but there she was, sitting in a folding chair near the casket with her mother cradling her shoulders. I stood in the doorway, crossed myself, said a five-second prayer, and asked God to take Miguel straight up to heaven because he was pretty special to me when I was sixteen, and we did more talking than screwing, which back then was a rare thing. Miguel was a cop and he and Isabela fell in love during Carlito’s trial because Miguel was the type of guy to lend support. He was shot on the job by another cop during a robbery at the Dolphin Mall. Friendly fire.

I didn’t want Isabela to see me. Not that night. It’s bad enough that she has to run into me at the supermarket, the pharmacy, and the gas station. She’s never been cruel to me like other people in the neighborhood. She always smiles, tells me she prays for my family and for me. That she forgives Carlito and she doesn’t want him to die. I believe her, too, because on the day of the sentencing, Isabela cried through her victim-impact statement with a picture of her daughter clutched against her chest — one of those department store Christmas portraits — Shayna in a new red dress; a face just like her mother’s in miniature. Isabela faced the judge, then turned from him to Carlito, who was handcuffed to a table beside his lawyer, and through her tears asked the court to go easy on him because Isabela said no matter Carlito’s crime, and no matter how much she believed in justice, one death is no cure for another.

Isabela and I were close friends once. She was a few years older but we were in the church Youth Group together and she took me for my first abortion when I was fourteen because she said it wasn’t right to bring that kind of shame on my mother who’d already been through so much, and Isabela knew of a doctor who didn’t require parental consent.

A few years later, Carlito fell in love with her.

I was jealous. Isabela with her soft smile, a blanket all the boys wanted to be wrapped in. No boy ever looked at me that way.

My brother used to say he saw a family in her gray eyes and I’d grow furious, tug on his sleeve, and say, “You already have a family.”

Something I’ve never admitted: I was the one who told Carlito about Isabela’s cheating when he was beer-drunk in front of the TV one Saturday afternoon, wondering why she took so long to return his calls.

I pumped him full of rage, told him she was giving him horns, that he was letting her play him like some kind of cabrón.

I lied.

Said everybody in town knew about her easy ways but him.

Sometimes when we run into each other Isabela invites me to her house for dinner because she knows I spend most nights home alone watching the local news, just me and a tin of pollo asado from the cantina. I never go. I appreciate the charity, but despite their daughter’s graciousness Isabela’s parents probably wouldn’t let me through the door if I showed up.

She always hugs me when she sees me, hums into my hair that even though people say we’re on opposing sides, we’re in this mierda together and her baby is an angel now watching over us all.

There was a time when Mami called my brother and me her angels.

Carlito and I would cram into bed with her at night and she’d tell us stories about Cartagena before our papi dragged us away from our grandmother’s home, across the sea to Miami, before this house with the iron security bars on the windows.

“Mis angelitos,” she’d whisper, kissing our cheeks as we curled under her wings.

We’d pretend Mami’s bed was a raft and we were castaways adrift together, floating through the Caribbean, and Carlito would point out dolphins, sea turtles, manta rays, and sharks while Mami and I played along like we could see them too. Until Carlito declared that there was land on the horizon and, at last, we were saved.

We were saved.

Like everything down here, the park used to be Tequesta land. It sits on a crusty peninsula jutting into the bay like an accusatory finger, a tropical hammock overgrown with invasive Australian pines, foreign flora that killed off the indigenous trees, keeping in all the bugs and blocking out most of the sunlight. To Carlito and me, suburban kids normally confined to small yards and patchy lots, it was a jungle.